Lars Doucet's personal blog -- Game design and stuff.

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It's hard to believe, but on January 19th 2016, four whole years will have passed since we first released our game Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten. What's even harder to believe is that we're still actively supporting it with patches and updates, with the biggest one of all soon…

I write about Steam a lot, because they hold my fate in their hands like a tiny bird. (Photo by Chris Yarzab, link) Given the recent flood of games onto Steam, I had high hopes for the long-awaited Discovery update, which introduced "organic" traffic channels such as customized home pages,…

Over two years ago I wrote an article called The Holy Grail of Digital Distribution where I described what an ideal digital game store might look like. In the last two weeks, Steam launched their long-anticipated storefront overhaul (which I'll call "NewSteam"), and I think it's time to assess how…

Let's find out. First of all, our total sales to date, across all PC portals for the original Defender's Quest are: $656,000 USD gross 195,000 units sold Next, our monthly sales on Steam: (No y-axis label because Steam doesn't like us being too specific about exact sales on…

You may have heard of "The Long Tail." For games, it means your sales start off strong and quickly taper off. This force drives the retail marketing cycle -- launch a game to extreme hype, sell it like crazy, then immediately abandon it and move on to the next…

Shortly after we published our giant sales report, Defender's Quest: By the Number, part 2, the Steam Linux client officially went public and was accompanied by a site-wide sale.The Linux sale featured every single Linux-compatible game on the service, including Defender's Quest. In preparation for this article, I…